FEMALE EDUCATION AND AGE AT MARRIAGE

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The focus of the research is the marriage "market" in four countries of East and Southeast Asia: Malaysia, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and Korea. We investigate female education levels, female age at first marriage, and the education levels of first husbands, drawing on individual-level data from the World Fertility Surveys. Our intention is to use the economic theory of search as the organizing framework for the empirical analyses. Search theory suggests that the length of search and the characteristics of the accepted match are joint products of a marriage searcher's definition of the minimum levels of various characteristics acceptable in a spouse. In consequence, relatively little behavioral information on marriage search can be gleaned from data on search duration -- here, age at first marriage -- alone. A convincing test of the theory required that duration data be combined with data on the spouse's characteristics. We will investigate such joint models. We treat a woman's educational attainment as if it represented, in part, an investment made by her parents with potential payoffs in the marriage market. Her age at first marriage will be identified with the length of search. Finally, husband's education will be treated as the female marital search counterpart to the wage rate in labor market search models. There are both conceptual and statistical difficulties inherent in applying search theory to first marriage. Corner solutions -- determining who is and is not yet eligible for marriage -- present more obvious difficulties with respect to marriage than they do in labor market search models. Changing marital "offer" frequencies and persistent, individual-specific unobservables are important considerations in the statistical work. Finally, the restriction of the WFS surveys to ever-married women requires us to devise maximum likelihood estimators appropriate for truncated data in order to give the implications of search theory a proper test.